


Marius, Revolutionary

by OphelieduLac



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: #protectandloveCosette2k16, Canon Era, Cosette has agency, F/M, Gen, History, I just wanted Cosette to do something, Marius isn't just a baby deer, Minor E/R because I am E/R trash, Napoleon III, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Barricade, Revolution of 1848, Some angst, overuse of parentheticals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 02:02:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7462317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OphelieduLac/pseuds/OphelieduLac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Conventional wisdom dictates that revolution is for the youth and conservatism for their elders. Well, Marius semi-consensually stalked his future wife for months before they formally spoke. He isn’t one for convention. </p>
<p>Or, In Which Marius and Cosette Are Radicalized.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marius, Revolutionary

**Author's Note:**

> Happy (really late) birthday to my best friend!

The moment he finds he is no longer supervised, no longer watched by M. Gillenormand or M. Fauchelevent, no longer attended to by his darling Cosette, Marius limps to a fiacre, leaning heavily on his new cane, working through every single shot of pain up his leg, and pays its driver an enormous sum for his silence.

Courfeyrac’s things are missing, but not in an unorganized manner; it must have been one of his sisters, collecting his possessions. The Paris inspectors would not have been so neat. Still, he combs every single nook and cranny of their shared apartment; to his relief, there’s nothing to find.

One down, eight to go.

Both Grantaire and Prouvaire’s apartments are in similar conditions; their things have been picked up by their family, but he searches them as best as he can with his limp and Jehan’s landlord staring at him suspiciously.

He almost gets into a brawl with Feuilly’s landlord, a gruff man who informs him that  _ No, Monsieur, you cannot see the apartment, _ and _ I’ve burned his things. He is dead and his rent is late. _ In the end, he swallows his rage and turns away, hoping that he didn’t cause too much of a spectacle and ruin his plan in the progress.

Joly and Bossuet’s landlady lets him up with a bemused look on her face, and he is greeted at the apartment by a pretty woman with dark clothes, tanned skin, and shockingly green eyes, eyes made brighter by the redness and puffiness around them. He attempts to introduce himself when she ushers him inside and their conversation is stilted and awkward, even by his standards. Every time he opened his mouth, Musichetta looked torn between wanting to cry more and wanting to take up arms against the King. In good conscience, given his recent ordeal, he couldn’t condone such sentiment, couldn’t condone another suicide mission.

(Couldn’t deal with the thought of another ghost, even one he didn’t particularly know.)

Eventually, he gets around to explaining his purpose in visiting the apartment, but the lady shakes her head, a small, sad smile making its way onto her face. “I’ve burned them. They’ll only find a grieving mistress.”

When he leaves, he pauses at the door. “If you ever need a place to stay, or work—“

“That is very kind, Monsieur. But I do not desire your pity.”

“It is not pity!” He hurries to say. “Lèsgles helped to keep me in university, once, and I never repaid the favor. And Joly was a good friend.” He pauses, before adding more quietly, “They both were. What kind of debtor and friend would I be, to allow misfortune to come to their mistress when I could intercede?”

He doesn’t wait for her reply, instead gives her the kindest smile he can muster, and hurries out.

Something similarly eventful takes place at Bahorel’s place of residence. The landlord is initially obstinate, rude, and brusque, but when Marius falls over his cane and cries out in pain, the man tells him in a low voice that he had disposed of his tenant’s possessions, and “taken great care.”

“Monsieur, I do not understand.”

Instead of replying, the man glances surreptitiously past Marius and quickly flashes something inside his jacket; a cockade. “Your wound is a gunshot wound, and if you were in the National Guard or the Inspectors, you would have come in uniform. I had been sent home from Rue-de-Bac just as the Guard arrived. When I found out that the gentleman in room six had fallen, I did everything I could to make sure it would not be traced to either of us.” The landlord straightened again, covering up the cockade again, and muttering “Vive la France! Vive la Révolution!”

(As he replies in kind and leaves, Marius can’t decide whether or not he wants to cry.)

Saving Combeferre and Enjolras’ apartments for last had been a deliberate action on his part; the two apartments were within the same building, and would undoubtedly house the largest amount of seditious materials; it meant that Marius could head straight back  _ chez Gillenormand _ without delay once he found what he’d been looking for.

(He owed them this much. He may not have been a republican like them, but he would rather see their legacy guarded and remembered rather than burned in distaste. It’s the least he can do.)

The landlady lets him up with a single glance at his leg, clucking  _ poor boys _ and  _ so sad _ and Marius wants to snap at her, wants to demand  _ where were you when they cried for help? _ But he moves slowly up the steps, first to Combeferre’s room. Its nooks and crannies and hideaways are bursting to the seams with banned pamphlets and books, with names that he’d only heard whispered among students when they were assured of their own safety.

(The landlady helps him carry them, bundled in bedsheets, to the fiacre, and he revises his opinion of her just a little.)

They do the same with a little more difficulty with Enjolras’ apartments. Had Marius had the misfortune of being a miner, he would have said he’d hit the motherlode; their leader had never bothered to hide his treasonous thoughts, why would he do the same in his own lodgings? Still, they put every ounce of even mildly-radical paper into the fiacre and Marius greases the landlady’s palms for her continued silence.

(It’s a small price to pay for the last memories he has of his comrades, truly.)

Upon returning  _ chez Gillenormand _ , his grandfather greets him with pursed lips and Marius glares back, daring him to challenge the contents of the transport. But the man instead pays the driver a hefty sum, and between the three of them, they carry the makeshift sacks into the Gillenormand library. His grandfather pays the driver again and sends him on his way, and instead of exploding like Marius had anticipated, like he’d been used to, the man breathes a weary sigh, “Be careful, my boy. I’m still trying to secure your pardon, after all.”

And then Marius is left alone with thousands of pages of treason.

\---

Thanks to his grandfather’s aptitude for social maneuvering, the newlywed couple are quickly thrust into the fashionable circles of high-society Paris almost immediately after they return from their honeymoon.

“Do I look alright, dear?” His darling asks, her brow creasing as she examines her image in the mirror. Cosette was far more nervous about these events than he, though that may just be because she, by no fault of her own, lacked the acclimatisation he had when he was younger

“Perfect, my love, always perfect.”

When they are ushered into the parlour of the house where they are dining that night, they are separated almost immediately by sex, and he longs for her proximity, though she only sits on the other side of a wall. 

“Pontmercy!” One man--a baron, the master of the manor-- calls to him. “How is the married life?” And he is quickly dragged into a conversation of trite pleasantries about their vacation to the South. 

(What he doesn’t say is that, when they stopped in Marseilles, Cosette had to drag him away from Courfeyrac’s grave, tears in both their eyes.)

After a time, both groups reconvene for dinner and he can tell at a glance that Cosette is brimming with anger. She’s well in control of it and were he not well-attuned to her emotions, he’d be unable to tell, but the fact remains that something had set her off. In turn, rage courses through him that  _ someone harmed Cosette _ , and his grip on his cane tightens, but before his own emotions become noticeable to others, she squeezes his arm and sends him a look, and dinner begins. 

It’s only in the carriage back to their home does she speak up, her rage only somewhat dissipated. “They were making cruel jokes about your friends.” Her voice is low. “That they got what they deserved. That they ought to have paraded them through the streets,  _ humiliated _ .” Marius can feel the air go out of his lungs, even though this isn’t the first time he’s heard words like these. “And I’m sorry, Marius, but I couldn’t  _ stand _ what they were saying about your friends-- friends who sounded wonderful and intelligent and bright with life!” 

(She does not add, though he hears nonetheless, that she cannot stand the idea of him in pain, that they spent their nights in Marseilles crying into each other's arms, he for friends he’d lost, she for friends dear to her husband that she’d never meet, that she doesn’t want him to experience pain like that again.)

He takes her hand, and she tightens hers in his grip. They barely let go of each other for the rest of the night. 

The next morning, when Cosette is still asleep, he stumbles across the piles of treason that he’d so many months ago spirited away from Enjolras’ and Combeferre’s apartments. 

He opens  _ Common Sense _ , the first pamphlet on the pile.

\---

Going out becomes harder. He and Cosette start finding it more difficult to find friends in ‘acceptable’ Parisian circles who don’t disdain social change. The June Rebellion is the hot topic on the lips of the aristocrats, even over a year after the fact; everyone has an opinion, and almost all of them are royalist. There are a few Bonapartists in there too, and initially, the Pontmercys gravitated toward them; after all, compared to royalists and republicans, Bonapartists were a moderating force. But something about them just felt... _ stale,  _ almost. Where Marius once felt sympathy and a desire to shout “ _ Vive l’Empereur! _ ” into the quiet night, he felt repulsion. And when the events of 1832 became too retreaded (and it certainly did; on the anniversary of the barricades, one Count put on a single-man spirited dramatization of the days’ events, recounted  _ ad nauseum _ until Marius shattered a teacup during one such recollection), Casual Disdain And Outright Antipathy For The Poor was the new topic _ du jour. _

The Pontmercys, who after Mass give alms to the poor and donate money to the building of shelters, who had both lived in poverty at one point (though Cosette’s recollection was far fuzzier than her husband’s), who did not see poverty as the fault of the poor, were patently unamused by the attitudes of the circles they were forced to run in. 

To add to their reasons to stay in, as Marius eats breakfast one morning, Cosette strides in, radiant and confident as ever, and announces over his newspaper. “I’m pregnant.”

Marius promptly drops his newspaper and his fine bone-china teacup.

Marius is going to be a  _ father. _

Cosette starts forward, a look of concern (and perhaps a twinge of fear) on her face after he spent a few beats staring at her in shock. “My love?”

And Marius drops to his knees off his chair and grasps her around her hips, bringing his face to her abdomen. “I’m going to be a father. A father.”

She’s nodding, though he can’t see it. “Parents.” Her voice is wobbly on that word, and he thinks she may be crying tears of joy. 

(He’s crying too, staining her dress. It doesn’t matter, though. They’re crying happily. This is a new sensation, to cry for joy.)

When they finally move again, they’re both arranged on the floor of the dining room, breakfast forgotten, Marius stroking her hair. “I’m so happy.” He whispers. “I’m so happy, but I’m so scared, and I don’t know if that’s normal.”

“I’m scared too.” She murmurs back. “But if it’s not normal to feel scared and happy, then it won’t be the first time we’re abnormal.”

They sit in silence for a bit longer, until, unwarranted but not unwelcome, Marius blurts out, “Courfeyrac would have been godfather. He’d be jumping with joy.”

Cosette doesn’t say anything, just lets him continue. 

“He’d go out in that ridiculous hat of his, and buy equally ridiculous hats for our child. And he’d take Bahorel with him. They’d outfit our little girl with the most fashionable clothes they could find.”

“Are you so sure we’re having a girl?”

“No, not at all, my dear. Whatever sex our child is, our friends would make the most fashionable child in town.”

He says “our”; his friends would have loved his wife, would have understood why he was so besotted with this angel. 

As it stands, the closest he can be to his friends these days is in the words of Rousseau and Robespierre and Saint-Just. Every time he sits within the confines of Paris society, every time he hears the stirring of parlour politics, he can hear his friends in his ears, hears Enjolras’ cry of rage when an aristocrat recites a transparently false fact, hears Combeferre’s measured tones as he rereads  _ Common Sense _ , hears one of Grantaire’s drunken rants every time he glances at a book in Greek. 

He never thought the republican cause held particular merit over the Bonapartist cause until it became his last lifeline to his friends. He hadn't know his father, but had become a Bonapartist in his name. Now, he knew his friends, had known the cause they fought for, had fought with them, and quite enjoyed every reading he'd made of  _ Common Sense. _ Without trying to sound cheesy, it made sense; Paine’s words were straightforward and thought-through, and if that was the sort of thing that Les Amis de l’ABC had fought for, then he could understand why they had been so inspired to put their lives on the line for it. 

(He didn't have to be happy about their sacrifice, though.)

\---

They announce Cosette’s pregnancy to society after she starts showing a little more, and one of the kindly older ladies who'd already seen her own daughters grow up, marry, and procreate is nice enough to throw a small bridal shower. 

His grandfather fusses over her, ecstatic that he will have a great-grandson (he's convinced the child will be male). The couple still go for their walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg, still pass out alms to the poor, still attend Mass religiously, but over time, Cosette’s mobility lessens. Of course, this was to be expected, but with his wife's increased time spent sedentary, he begins to spend more time with his friends’ revolutionary pamphlets. He still favors rereading Paine, but he finds that Robespierre, bloodthirst aside, had some seriously spectacular points. The Republican cause had been worth the hype. 

_ Wait. _

With a great shout, Marius flings himself up from his desk, pamphlets flying everywhere. “ _ Vive la Révolution!” _ He cries.  _ “Vive la République!” _

It is ecstasy, struck down to the core; to be a Bonapartist was to take too weak--and in some cases, too antagonistic-- of a stance to take against injustice and illiberalism.  _ “À bas le roi! Vive le Peuple!” _ The people deserve more, greater than the stagnation and nostalgia of an imperial France.

However, unlike the last similar instance of self-realization, this is midday, and the house’s other primary occupant is awake. 

“Dear?” Cosette soon appears in the doorway, five months pregnant and wrapped in a shawl over her dress. 

And Marius freezes; what would Cosette think? He doubts she holds any strong royalist or Bonapartist leanings, but he is still advocating treason! 

And even if she is unconcerned with the thought of her husband, the traitor, she doesn’t need to concern herself with such dark matters; she’s pregnant, for goodness’ sakes! The doctor said she was supposed to relax without stress! 

Marius, for the first time in two months, begins a fit of histrionics; it is the end to a shockingly long spate without such fits. 

(His love had never chastised him for his bouts of hysteria; despite it being a woman’s ailment, he’d never felt her judging him for it.)

“Cosette, my darling, it's nothing to worry about, I promise, won't you sit down on the settee in the parlour?” He doesn't even stop with those futile words, vision tunneling as he hyperventilates and attempts to convince her to walk away from the words that had killed his friends, could yet kill him. 

(He is a republican, now he knows. Such beliefs alone could undo all the salvage his pardon had gotten him. No doubt he is still being watched, even now.)

Her hand is on his shoulder, ( _ Where did she come from?  _ He's mentally berating himself, _ she’s pregnant and worried about him! She shouldn't be concerned about him! _ ) then on his back, and she's cooing into his ear, and his vision and senses are returning.

When he calms, Cosette is examining a pamphlet in her hand; she reads the title aloud: “ _ Déclaration des Droites de la Femme et de la Citoyenne _ , by Olympe de Gouges.” Her brow furrows minutely. “She...she was executed during the Terror, wasn't she? For lambasting Robespierre and the others for refusing to extend rights to women.” When Marius doesn't respond, she continues, “I heard a little about it from the nuns at the convent. Marius, where did you get these?”

“My darling Cosette, please--”

“Marius.” Her tone is strong, but not angry, and he wilts a little; so much for not worrying her.

He sighs. He's never been able to hide anything from Cosette; even keeping her father’s past from her had been a trial, even if he had thought it in her best interests. Besides, since that series of events and Cosette’s ire in the aftermath (though short-lived and hardly destructive), they’d resolved to be truthful with each other. So he tells her the truth: “Enjolras’ and Combeferre’s apartments. I searched everyone’s lodgings, and this is what I found.” He gestures at the piles of paper, unable to do more than that. “This is what I have left of them.”

“And your exclamation earlier?” She prods lightly.

With a gulp of air, he tells her. “I believe. I finally believe, and it’s too late.” Something feels wet around his eyes, and he knows he’s crying just as surely as he knows that he’s a republican now. “They tried to dissuade me from my Bonapartist leanings in their life, and yet in their death, I understand. And it’s too late.” He feels her move her hand to his face to wipe away his tears, and he continues. “And I know that this is dangerous, but they were right. If I didn’t believe that before, I do now. And now I’m worrying you, because they could  _ kill _ me for this, and I couldn’t bear to leave you alone, not now, not ever.”

Instead of answering, Cosette looks at the de Gouges work that remains in her other hand. She seems to analyze the cover for a few drawn-out moments, before speaking softly. “Well, perhaps it is best that you convince me to believe, too.”

His brain appears to be malfunctioning. He tells her as much. Well, ‘tells’ is a strong word, perhaps ‘stuttering and tripping over his own words’ is a better approximation of the garbled nonsense that it seems she can understand. 

She smiles slightly, still fond of him despite everything about himself that he sees as a personal failing. “I have no love for the aristocrats we know, you are aware. If this is how you remember your friends, then you ought to do the polite thing and introduce us.” When he begins to interject, she cuts him off. “And if we’re both traitors, then we will never be parted. You’ll never leave me, nor I you.”

“B-But, you are a lady, and pregnant, and ought not to partake--” He never manages to finish what exactly in which she ought not to partake, because Olympe de Gouges’ name has been shoved in his face. Literally, Cosette has taken the pamphlet and lightly plastered it against his face, either as a means of telling him to be quiet, or to remind him that women  _ could  _  participate in revolutionary discourse, or both, perhaps. He hears her giggling under her breath, so he knows that she won’t hold his outburst against him, and he slowly peels the pamphlet out from between her tiny, splayed hand and his face. 

Marius sighs. “You’ll be careful about this?”

“Will you?” Her face is sombre to match his.

He lifts himself out of his seat at his desk, but lowers himself to the floor, bringing her gently down with him until she’s lying with her head in his lap, staring up at him. He opens the pamphlet to the first page: “ _ Les mères, les filles, les soeurs, représentantes de la nation, demandent… _ ”

\---

Their son is born healthy and strong, one Saturday in October; both mother and son survive, to Marius’ delighted relief.

(His grandfather had been the only one there to comfort him as he paced the hall outside the birthing chamber, hysterical and terrified. He found himself desperately wishing--not for the first time-- for the comfort of Courfeyrac, or Bossuet, or any of his friends. Any of them, even Enjolras, who likely would have stood around awkwardly and patted him skittishly on the shoulder.)

(Enjolras, Marius thought in retrospect, would not have thrived around the prospect of children.)

The child is named Jean-Georges, because neither Cosette nor Marius want their fathers forgotten, and M. Gillenormand positively crows that he was right about the child’s sex. Had the old man been a decade or so younger, he might have done an undignified jig. As it was, he settled for telling everyone ten times over-- even the new parents themselves, even the servants-- that he had a great-grandson. 

Parenting is exhausting, for they’ve resolved to be as involved in the lives of their child as they can afford to be-- an anomaly among their social circles, especially augmented by the fact that the man of the house _ wants _ to participate in child-rearing, but it does prevent them from having to interact with those they prefer to avoid-- and sometimes, even despite their best efforts, they do have to foist tiny Jean-Georges off on one of the servants just to get a few hours rest. 

Even still, they do find time to devour page after page of treason, from Rousseau to Paine, to Lacombe to de Gouges, to Saint-Just to Robespierre, Danton to Roland, to even Enjolras’ and Combeferre’s and Feuilly’s own writings that had been shoveled haphazardly into the piles of paper. 

(The latter are treasured the most, the last remnants of the minds of dead friends.)

Cosette takes to all the materials like a moth to a flame, like a torch to wood. She sifts through ideas with him, and moments when they are not taking care of Jean-Georges or working or sleeping are spent debating with him the merits of different ideas and schools of thought. 

(Not for the first time, he thinks that his friends would have adored her.)

It is nearing Jean-Georges’ second birthday (and shortly after Cosette’s announcement that she is pregnant again) when the porter finds them in the parlour and informs them that they have guests: a grisette and her child, asking for M. Pontmercy. 

With a glance at his wife, who nods back calmly in a way that tells him she doesn’t suspect him of any infidelity (and how could he partake in any such affair, when they were practically inseparable from the moment that her father had brought him back from the barricades, and that his clear, fumbling inexperience on their wedding night had demonstrated?), he tells the porter to send the two in. 

It is some surprise, moments later, when a tan woman with green eyes sways into the room like she wasn’t clothed as a grisette in worn clothes, a small child clutching at her skirts. 

He stands immediately, “Mlle. Musichetta!” Next to him, Cosette rises as well, recognizing the name from the stories he’d told her. 

Musichetta looks thinner than when he’d seen her four years ago and perhaps a little more tired, but her eyes remain alight with the same green glow. The child next to her, a little girl of maybe three or four, stares around at the relative opulence of the Pontmercy residence in open wonderment, shadows of the past seemingly ghosting across her face. 

He cannot help himself but ask. “She is--”

“Joly’s and Lèsgles’, yes. This is Isabella.” 

Cosette surprises him by gliding over and guiding Musichetta to a chair, gently sitting her down in it, and calling for tea for their guests. Isabella follows her mother, crawling up onto her lap. 

“I did not know that you had given birth.”

“I left Paris when I did. I am unmarried, and her birth would have caused a scandal. I would be unable to get work.” Rage crosses her face; Marius can see that she is clearly upset with the way of things, and can only condone her emotions. “As it stands, I’ve only managed to do so by hiding Isabella away during the day, but I was recently fired from the shop where I worked when she stumbled in, crying that a man had broken into our apartment.” She looks like she’s steeling herself for something. “You once offered me your assistance, M. Pontmercy, and I would like to take you up on that offer, just for as long as I need to get us on our feet.”

Marius is about to respond, but Cosette is already on the floor, on her knees next to Musichetta, smiling at the girl in Musichetta’s lap. “Hello, Mlle. Isabella.” With a start, he realizes that she probably hears her own mother, Fantine, in Musichetta’s words; a child born to an unmarried woman, who is subsequently thrown out of her place of work due to the scandal.

If he hadn’t already been one-hundred-percent prepared to give shelter indefinitely to Musichetta and Isabella, this would have sealed the deal. 

Isabella ducks her head away, shy, but Cosette continues as Musichetta smiles tentatively at the both of them, “Would you and your mother like to stay here with my husband and I? You can stay as long as you want, and we’ll help take care of you.”

“Mme. Pontmercy--”

“Please, call me Cosette. Any friend of my husband’s is a friend of mine.” And she turns a blinding smile on the other woman. 

“Cosette, then, it’ll only be for a short time.”

“Nonsense, you won’t be imposing. Right, dear?” Marius nods from his place on the settee when she looks back at him. She turns back, “I’d be so happy to have a girl-friend, after all; aristocrats are really quite boring and it’d be great to have another person to talk to.”

Musichetta looks a little overwhelmed at this outpouring of kindness, but nods anyway.  It is thus settled, that Musichetta and Isabella become part of their household.

(When Marius is yet again left pacing outside the birthing chamber months later, his hysteria is this time partly assuaged by the tiny girl who holds his and Jean-Georges’ hands, and the fact that Cosette is not alone with only the midwife on the other side of the door.)

\---

Musichetta and Cosette, as it turns out, get along like a house on fire, especially once Cosette introduces her to the stash of seditious materials (nearly giving Marius a heart-attack in the process); Musichetta, though her letters are not up to the same scratch as either of them, is a quick learner and eagerly discusses theory with the two of them. 

(It’s not a replacement for his friends, but they fill the void quite nicely.)

Isabella, once she steps out of her shell of shyness, latches onto Jean-Georges and their newest, Fantine, and clearly never intends to let go; when it comes time to begin lessons for Jean-Georges, Marius quickly signs her up as well, figuring it’ll do everyone a world of good. The tutor is perhaps a bit thrown, but goes ahead with the lessons for both of them regardless, the hint of a small smile on his face.

( _ Education for all _ , Combeferre’s voice says in his ear.)

Finding work outside their residence is difficult for Musichetta, no matter how hard she tries. Cosette, of her own volition, starts hunting for ways to pay her themselves without handing her an insulting position, or one that is already filled. The opportunity comes one day when Musichetta mentions offhand that she can play pianoforte at a proficient level; Cosette seizes on this and tells her that she would pay her to teach their children. The two of them argue for weeks about this, before Musichetta agrees, but only for continued room and board. 

(Marius, in charge of finances, gives them both a sizeable allowance regardless. His law practice is thriving, especially with his ability to prosecute and defend in multiple languages. Even the police have sought him out on occasion, to translate the cries and testimonies of those detained who do not speak French.)

The tutor, too, is a blessing; M. Bertrand, after scoping out their political leanings for months on end, informs Marius of a group of republicans meeting in the Latin Quarter (and the shiver runs up his spine, for that’s where  _ they _ had always met). Marius talks it over with Musichetta and Cosette first; Musichetta goes to scope it out, determine its veracity (and that they’re not meeting in the Musain, for that would have been too much to bear). When she comes back, unscathed, with good news, the three of them begin devising a plan to visit and partake: visiting in rotations, always in the clothing of a worker, always taking a different way home. 

(If some funds go  _ missing _ around the same time that the republicans find themselves in the favor of a benefactor, then Marius has no idea where they went. None whatsoever.)

After M. Gillenormand passes, and all the rites of mourning have been observed, the Pontmercys quickly find themselves at leisure to explore social circles more populated with the  _ nouveau riche _ ; some are royalists, many are Bonapartists, but a sizeable, quiet contingent are republicans. Going out becomes much more enjoyable, since now they have allies among the upper classes who they can interact with when the royalists become too much of a headache. 

(When Cosette becomes pregnant for a third time, she actually seems put out that she won’t be able to venture out of the house as often anymore. Musichetta laughs at this.)

(They name their newest daughter Émilie, after Émile Courfeyrac.)

\---

On New Year’s Day, 1848, they already know something is coming. It’s not just the student groups murmuring discontent, but the workers, the  _ nouveaux riches _ , the republicans and the Bonapartists alike. Even something seems surlier about the  _ gamins _ and  _ gamines _ as they pass through the streets. Only the royalists are immune to this miasmatic funk. 

In the Pontmercy household, this discontent is felt in the way that M. Bertrand instructs lessons about social classes and injustice to Fantine and Émilie, ten and eight respectively, in the way that teenagers Isabella and Jean-Georges quietly put their heads together to discuss what they’ve heard on the streets, the way that Musichetta has become jumpier at the slightest loud noise, the way that both Cosette and Marius eye the locked cupboard under the stairs during the rush hours of the day.

This mood continues until the end of February. 

He’s walking back from lunch with a potential client when he hears the cry,  young and brash and full of life: “ _ Aux Barricades! _ ”

Marius isn’t standing in the street in 1848, all of a sudden. It’s 1832, and he’s at a funeral-turned-riot, and he’s ignoring the cries for calm from the Marquis de Lafayette, and he’s running, following Courfeyrac and Joly to a cafe, to barricade themselves in. To die. 

Someone running by hits him, jolts him back to reality with a thud and a “ _ Pardon, citoyen!” _

(The man from earlier had sounded so much like Jehan, it almost physically hurt.)

He follows the crowd to the epicenter of the revolutionary blast, and already, the people outnumber the revolutionaries of 1832 by at least three times. Furniture is being thrown about; the barricades are already taller than the one he’d stood behind sixteen years ago. One man is shouting to another about the political banquets ban; this is the result of that law. 

(Something like hope swells in his chest.)

He rushes back home, completely intending to return, but  _ they need to know, first _ . 

Cosette greets him at the door, wearing a peasant’s dress and a boy’s cap. 

(She looks frighteningly like another girl who’d gone to the barricades, all those years ago, never to return.)

Marius takes one look at her, and the balloon of swelling hope in his chest pops. “No.”

(He’s terrified. He cannot lose anyone else.)

“That’s ridiculous.”

He marches into the house and she follows, practically slamming the door behind him. In the parlour, the children are all pressed against the glass window, watching people running toward the square with the barricades. Musichetta has been watching the door warily, and nods in clear relief when she sees them walk in.

“I want to go!” Jean-Georges and Isabella chorus.

As one, the three adults in the room speak: “No!”

“But--”

“No!” There is fear in their voices (voices rarely raised against them), and that’s probably what quiets the children. 

Musichetta pulls the both of them into a small huddle in the corner of the room, one with an easy view of the children lest they attempt to sneak out. “I’m not going out there. Someone has to watch these terrors.” She smiles fondly at the children, but there’s still fear in her voice. 

“Cosette, my darling, please--”

“Would you like me to list  _ why _ , exactly, you’re wrong?” His wife looks positively, stunningly irate. “Let’s begin with the Jacobine, Claire Lacombe: Women have the right to bear arms to defend France, since it is their duty to partake in the protection of the state and their liberties. A King infringing upon those very liberties is what sparked this riot, and do not think I won’t exercise my natural right to defend my country.” 

He gapes. That’s really all he can do, honestly. Cosette has always been stubborn and a little reckless; in some cases, to a fault. Their life has hardly been an idyll; there have been fights wherein his (sometimes overblown) concerns and her (sometimes justified) stubbornness have exacerbated the content of a disagreement. He wants to chalk her words up to those qualities, but finds he really can’t. 

He has a sudden vision of Combeferre, Cosette, Bahorel, and Enjolras, gathered around a map, planning a meticulous attack on the monarchy, rifles slung over their shoulders. Cosette looks like holy fire, righteous and unyielding and terrifying all at once. 

(In that moment, he’s pretty sure he fell in love with her all over again.)

When he doesn’t respond for a few seconds, she steps a little closer, changing tack: “I told you, all those years ago, that I will never leave you, and you would never leave me, not in this pursuit. How can you hold me to those words if I am not there with you?”

He nods, finally. Cosette pulls him to her, kisses him full on the mouth (ignoring the ‘ews’ and ‘yucks’ from the children and the laugh from Musichetta), and drags him, as he’s slightly dazed, to the cupboard, unlocking it and handing him a rifle and ammunition, then getting two more sets and handing one to Musichetta with which to protect the house and the children. 

Then, they’re off, into the streets, hand-in-hand. 

\---

Getting to the barricades are not difficult once they run into a student who recognizes them from their jaunts to the Latin Quarter. The boy helps them into a section of the barricade with others they know and others they don’t, and rushes off to help others. 

(A few glance questioningly at Cosette, but they seem reassured when she puts the rifle in her hands to good use.)

They keep themselves practically glued together; if one is to die, the other will too. It’s not something either of them consciously acknowledges or verbalizes, it’s just something that  _ is _ . They simply move along the barricades as one unit; while one reloads, the other shoots. 

Between the two of them, as the Army and the Guard fires at them, kills others around them, they shoot to wound, not to kill. Others have no such interest in those mercies, but Marius had long since told her of her father’s actions at the 1832 barricades, that he had never shot to kill.

(Jean Valjean is not the only ghost who makes himself known on this new barricade, sixteen years later. Marius swears he hears someone--  _ not just someone, _ his mind tells him,  _ Courfeyrac _ \-- call his name, and when he turns to look for the source of the voice, a bullet whizzes past, missing him by mere inches. And when they are bogged down by the Army, fighting, he hears Feuilly’s voice, as if the man were inches from him, encouraging him to hold the line. He hears Grantaire’s voice, lazy in his ear, telling him where the Army sniper is; the voice isn’t wrong, and the sniper falls, wounded.

Cosette doesn’t call him crazy when he tells her this. She calls it divine intervention. Marius prays she’s right.)

After days of fighting, the call goes up: the King is abdicating and fleeing the country. All around them, people are shouting and celebrating; their comrades on the barricade are cheering with reckless abandon. Rules of propriety seem to be temporarily suspended, because their male comrades are hugging Cosette and the few other female fighters who had come out of the woodwork, but since his wife doesn’t mind, he tries not to mind. 

(The little nagging in his head, though, is completely shut down when Cosette grabs him and kisses him, tears of happiness streaming down their faces, and he grabs her by the waist and swings her around. They’re both covered in soot and flecks of blood, and gunpowder residue and they’re tired and hungry, but they’re so ecstatic. “ _ Liberté, _ ” she’s mumbling into his ear. “ _ Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité… _ ” She pauses for dramatic effect and he can feel her grin “ _...Sororité. _ ”)

The days after are blurry and fast-paced. Marius, it seems, has a ‘reputation for republicanism’  (somewhere, he swears, Courfeyrac is laughing at him), and between that and the quickly-circulating fact that he had also been on the Barricades of ‘32, he is practically catapulted into a seat on the National Assembly of the Second Republic of France. 

(Cosette has become something of a celebrity, too. Several men who witnessed her at the barricades have called her  _ La France Personifiée _ , embodying beauty and grace and revolutionary ideals all at once, and from there, the image has spread into an almost folkloric legend.)

(His wife laughs at these stories, then laughs harder when Marius makes an offhand, disgruntled comment about how Enjolras used to claim that his mistress was  _ Patria _ . She and Musichetta keep giggling intermittently about it for days.)

Jean-Georges wants to follow his father to the Assembly, to see how politics are carried out, but Marius puts his foot down on that; things are not entirely stable yet, and he wants his children safe. He’s pretty sure that’s not going to stop him from escaping the house to explore the city with Isabella (who, despite looking like a female Joly, seems to have inherited Bossuet’s luck), so he sits his son down and explains to him that, while things are unstable and both Marius and Cosette are in the public eye, it is best if he is not associated with the Pontmercy family. 

(This conversation actually figured heavily in how Musichetta had to, at one point, run down to the police station to pick up one Valjean and one Lèsgles, who had attempted a series of  drunken antics, including fiacre-hopping to great ill-effect and ended up detained for twenty-four hours, to the terror and chagrin of their mothers.)

Marius’ premonition seems to be right, though; the Assembly began shifting to the more conservative side of the spectrum; soon, he was the only radical left, only held in the Assembly by popular sentiment. The June Days Uprising did nothing to help it at all. Then, the Bonapartes came. Not the Bonapartists, but the  _ Bonapartes; _ at the head of them was Louis-Napoleon, and for all that Cosette ribbed him that his younger self would have loved this, he could sense the undertone of worry in her voice. 

The Pontmercy household moves quickly. In October 1851, when things were just starting to look  _ really _ bad, Musichetta agrees to take the children to England, where politics were less polarized, leaving a tearful Marius and Cosette to do what salvage they could.

At the brink of dawn, Cosette and Marius go to see Musichetta and the children off in the carriage that will take them to Calais, so that they may take a boat across the Channel. 

Émilie, despite being eleven,  is crying, clutching at her mother, and Marius can see that Cosette’s doing all she can to hold herself together. He watches as she lowers herself to eye-level with her youngest, hugging her back. “Never forget that Mama loves you. Never forget, Émilie.” When she finally lets go of her mother, she attaches herself to her father (he can feel the tear stains in his coat) and he does what he can to calm her. 

(He’s gotten very good at soothing crying children over the past seventeen-or-so years. He’s almost proud of this fact.)

Fantine is a little more reticent with her feelings, but she still hugs her mother like she doesn’t want to let go, and practically piles her father into a hug (his apparent limpet, Émilie, hasn’t let go of him yet).

Jean-Georges, who is holding himself like the whole world has been thrust onto his shoulders, accepts the hugs his parents give him without complaint, and if he does sob silently into their outerwear, well, no one says anything. 

Finally, Isabella, eighteen and sharp as a tack (and about as unlucky as one of her fathers) engulfs Cosette in a hug, murmuring words neither of them could make out. Isabella may have never been theirs, but she’d been loved as if she were. When she releases her, she does the same to Marius. 

Cosette and Musichetta spend several moments alone, hugging and bidding each other goodbye and promising to write; both have tears in their eyes. 

(Both know writing truthfully probably won’t be possible; letters addressed to M. et Mme. Pontmercy will be intercepted and opened before they reach their intended recipients.)

Musichetta and Marius do not exchange words in the same manner. Instead, they shake hands, and in that moment, both of them suspend propriety and hug briefly. 

The Pontmercys watch the carriage wheel away, their family safe inside, until it is out of sight. 

(It’s a rough day for both of them. But they work through it.)

After they receive the appointed letter from Calais, informing them of the ‘vacation’ they were taking across the Channel, the two throw themselves into work. Marius continued to attempt to pull the National Assembly back into some semblance of sanity, and Cosette agitated in cafes as best as she could (they wouldn’t let a woman speak, after all).

(How Marius held onto his seat in the Assembly was beyond him; the icing on the cake came two months later, long after they’d received word from England that all was well. Louis-Napoleon struck a coup; the Assembly was dissolved, and the Second Empire was established under Napoleon III.)

They multiplied their activism. They were in their forties now; by all accounts, it was an anomaly to live past forty-five in the modern era of the 1850s. Their family was safe in England-- what did they have to lose now?

(Only each other.)

(They spend so long in unsanitary parts of the country, doing what they can to help others, that it’s almost predictable when, four years later, they both come down with consumption.)

(They pass within a month of each other.)

\---

His throat is no longer wracked with pain and blood as he walks into the blinding light, into an all-too-familiar-looking cafe. 

His friends-- and Valjean, and Mabeuf, and Gavroche, and a woman he assumes to be Cosette’s mother, and even some friends he lost during Napoleon III’s crackdowns-- were gathered around tables, drinking, looking merry, but he only had eyes for one person. 

Cosette sits at a wood table, looking deep in conversation with Enjolras and Combeferre about something; Grantaire is sitting to Enjolras’ side in a proximity Marius couldn’t remember the two of them ever sharing in life.

(Death is a different story. He’d heard the stories whispered by National Guardsmen, of the angelic revolutionary in ‘32, unafraid to die, who accepted the hand of a man claiming to be a revolutionary, but who smelled of wine. That they’d died holding hands, smiling.)

Cosette suddenly turns her head to the side, noticing him; she looks as young as she did when they first met (not that her age had ever taken from her beauty, but to be reminded of her youth was to be struck again to the bone). 

She’s in his arms all of a sudden, crying his name; close at her heels is Courfeyrac, who is hugging the both of them like never intends to let them go. 

Joly and Bossuet are immediately behind, professing thank yous for taking care of Musichetta and Isabella. 

He can see over their shoulders that Enjolras and Grantaire are standing now, and that the former is smiling at him with a kind of pride that the revolutionary had never directed at Marius, never in his life.

(Enjolras and Grantaire are still holding hands. Marius is glad for that.)

And Éponine and Gavroche and Valjean and Mabeuf and Combeferre and Jehan and Bahorel and Feuilly and Enjolras and Grantaire and Fantine and everyone else in the room descends upon the hug pile. 

And Marius is home. 

(Marius, revolutionary at last, is home among his fellows.)

**Author's Note:**

> ‘Get the history nerd hooked on Les Mis,’ they said. ‘It’ll be fine,’ they said. I think I lost it toward the end, but I DID IT. I wrote a fanfic for the first time in years (and for the first time on AO3)! If I have any single regret, it’s that I didn’t have enough E/R in it. Because I ship them probably more than I’ll ship me and anyone I’ll ever be with.  
> Fun fact: Common Sense actually advocated a rudimentary form of socialism. Suck on that, Limbaugh!  
> Most of this was based on what I know about the characters from the book, the musical, and the movie, but since I’m still on Volume 1, Book 2 of the book (and reading it in French, why did I decide to read it in French?) and most of what I know comes from skipping around in a shitty English translation, there’re probably some issues.


End file.
